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The objective of the paper is to describe how criminal prosecutors in the USA have expanded the reach of federal statutes punishing fraud and extortion to combat the influence of organized criminal groups in certain American labor unions and employee benefit plans from 1980 to 2006.

The paper reviews newspaper accounts and published judicial decisions to explain how prosecutors have used fraud and extortion offenses in novel ways on a case‐by‐case basis to prosecute labor‐management corruption in the USA.

Although the American federal prosecutor's arsenal is limited to statutory crimes, prosecutors are continually evolving new means of addressing corruption on a case‐specific basis in the best tradition of Anglo‐American common law. By diligently persuading trial judges, appellate courts, and the US Congress of the merit of looking at fraud and extortion in new ways, federal prosecutors have carried out the intent of the statutory laws which Congress enacted to deal with corruption in government, business, and labor unions.

The federal criminal offense of “honest service fraud,” which was codified by Congress only following successful criminal prosecutions of public and private corruption, will continue to be used to address corruption on the part of persons holding fiduciary duties toward union members and employee pension and health benefit plan participants as the American retired population increases and the national government assumes greater oversight of employee health care.

The paper encourages the reader, especially those in law enforcement, to think creatively about the scope of existing criminal statutes while reviewing or enforcing their application to all forms of organizational corruption.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to Section 901(a) of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, which deals with “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations” and is popularly known as the “RICO” statute.

RICO was designed to protect legitimate enterprises from infiltration by organized crime. The paper discusses one case in which a bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), was found to have violated RICO by engaging in prohibited racketeering activities and a second case in which another bank, UBS AG, engaged in activities criminal under US law. The paper then details some of the activities of the two banks and explores the remedies available under RICO.

Following the failure of BCCI, the US filed a criminal information against the bank that included a forfeiture allegation under Section 1963 of RICO. In February of 2009, UBS AG, Switzerland's largest bank, entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the US Department of Justice, under the terms of which the bank agreed to waive indictment and consented to the filing of an information charging the bank with participating in a conspiracy to defraud the USA and its agency, the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of 18 USC 371.

BCCI may be something of an extreme case in terms of the breadth and scope of the illegal activities in which it engaged. But, it is not the only example of a bank gone wrong. Unfortunately, abuses can and do continue, although not every case may end with RICO forfeiture. Indeed, in a recent case with faint echoes of BCCI, RICO did not come into play at all.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development and nature of organized crime in the USA over the past 50 years, emphasizing organized crime's corruption and victimization of legitimate businesses and describing law enforcement's efforts to combat organized crime through specific case studies.

First, the paper analyzes the control over and corruption of legitimate businesses in the USA by the La Cosa Nostra (“LCN,” or the American Mafia), including the following industries: Las Vegas gaming; moving and storage; garment; waste – hauling; and, construction, and the following unions: the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; Laborers International Union of North America; and, the International Longshoreman's Association. The paper also describes law enforcement's successful efforts to combat such corruption through the use of criminal and civil racketeering laws and specific prosecutions. The paper then discusses the emergence in the mid‐1980s of non‐traditional organized crime groups in the USA, including various Asian ethnic groups and large‐scale human trafficking organizations that impact Europe and Asia as well as the USA.

The non‐traditional criminal groups not only prey on the legitimate businesses in ethnic Asian communities in the USA, but they also engage in complex crimes, alien smuggling, drug trafficking, credit‐card frauds, money laundering, and other financial crimes. There has emerged a new era for organized crime that began in the 1990s with the fall of the former Soviet Union and the emergence of transnational organized crime groups emanating from the nations comprising the former Soviet Bloc. These organized crime groups engage in a wide variety of economic crimes including extortion, fraud, illicit appropriation of natural resources, and public corruption. Such extensive corruption threatens the stability of some of these emerging nations.

This paper will be valuable to law enforcement offices and policy makers to assist them to understand the scope and nature of organized crime's adverse effects upon businesses and economic interests and to develop tools to combat such criminal activities.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the rationale behind the approaches to organised crime in criminal law to understand the basis of the law on conspiracy in England and Wales and why this country has refused to amend conspiracy in favour of a membership offence or a criminal enterprise model, similar to the USA’s offences.

The analysis is based on a legal comparison between the law of conspiracy in England and Wales and the USA’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute, as example of best practice targeting criminal enterprises. The legal comparison is also substantiated by case law examples and interviewees with prosecutors and lawyers collected both in London and in New York City.

After briefly describing how the two systems (English and American) are intended to work, the paper will develop a discussion on the difficulties and advantages of introducing a RICO-style legislation in England and Wales and shall conclude that it is the way organised crime is socially perceived in the English/British scenario that justifies the choice to remain on the level of conspiracy and not move towards membership/enterprise offences.

This study shall be primarily intended as an opportunity to assess the criminal law tools in the fight against organised crime available in England and Wales. The comparative side of this research, the RICO statute, would require more attention which this paper cannot give for reasons of brevity. Therefore, the study is a preliminary study in comparative criminal law.

The central idea of this work is to suggest that differences in criminal law are based on different perceptions of the wrongfulness of the offending. For the law to change in favour of a criminal enterprise offence in England and Wales, there is a need to reshape the wrongfulness of organised crime. A study into the wrongfulness of organised crime as a criminal offence, with a comparative outlook, has never been conducted before in England and Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to show that subordinated debt regulatory proposals assume that transactions in the secondary market of subordinated debt can attenuate moral hazard on the part of management if secondary market prices are informative signals of the risk of the institution. Owing to the proprietary nature of dealer prices and the liquidity of secondary transactions, the practical value of information provided by subordinated debt issues in isolation is questionable.

A multivariate dynamic risk signal is proposed that combines fluctuations in equity prices, subordinated debt and senior debt yields. The signal is constructed as a coincident indicator that is based in a time series model of yield fluctuations and equity returns. The extracted signal monitors idiosyncratic risk of the intermediary because yields and equity returns are filtered from market conditions. It is also predictable because it is possible to construct a leading indicator based almost entirely on spreads to Treasury.

The signal for the Bank of America and Banker's Trust is implemented. For Bank of America, the signal points mainly to two events of uprising risk: January 2000 when the bank disclosed large losses in its bond and interest‐rate swaps portfolios; and November 2000 when it wrote off $1.1 billion for bad loans. For Banker's Trust, the signal points to October/November 1995 after the filing of federal racketeering charges against Banker's Trust; and October 1998 when the bank suffered substantial losses from its investments in emerging markets.

The signal is a complementary instrument for regulators and investors to monitor and assess in real time the risk profile of the financial institution.

Many analyses point to Trump's behavior on the world stage – bullying and racketeering more reminiscent of a mafioso than a statesman – as a personal character flaw. We argue that, while this behavior was shocking in how unvarnished it was, Trump marks the culmination of a decades-long trend that shifted US foreign policy from a regime of “legitimate protection” in the mid-twentieth century to a “protection racket” by the turn of the twenty-first. While the temperaments of successive presidents have mattered, the problems facing the United States and its role in the world are not attributable to personalities but are fundamentally structural, in large part stemming from the contradictions of US attempts to cling to preeminence in the face of a changing global distribution of power. The inability of successive US administrations – Trump and Biden included – to break out of the mindset of US primacy has resulted in a situation of “domination without hegemony” in which the United States plays an increasingly dysfunctional role in the world. This dynamic has plunged the world into a period of systemic chaos analogous to the first half of the twentieth century.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the origins and forms of organised crime and develop policy conclusions for deterrence efforts.

The paper begins by contrasting two theories of justice and evaluating their merits with respect to organised crime. Sociological and economic origins of organised crime, its institutional forms and law enforcement responses are identified. Research into the theory of organised crime is complemented by historical examples from Italy and the USA.

The paper finds that analysis of organised crime must go beyond the institutions of the state and its social contract with the populace. It must recognise relevant social and economic causative factors, and include institutional and rational choice analysis in order to better understand the nature of criminal organisations.

Policy implications for deterrence efforts include support for the establishment of ad hoc enforcement agencies, infiltration of criminal networks, targeting the proceeds of crime, and statutes allowing prosecution for conspiracy or a broad range of racketeering offences.

The paper presents a conceptual view of organised crime which provides useful policy conclusions and a basis for future research.

Reports a study by the Centre for the Study of Economic Crime at Rand Afrikaans University into the characteristics of money laundering schemes in South Africa; these were discussed at a workshop on December 5 2001. Outlines the 1998 Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA), the 1992 Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act and their general money laundering provisions, including negligence and intent, defence and penalties; also the racketeering provisions of POCA. Moves on to the reporting of suspicious transactions, where the POCA provisions will be repealed by the new Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA); this covers general obligations, secrecy and confidentiality, penalties, preventing tipping‐off, and reporting statistics. Gives examples of the schemes themselves, which fall into broad themes: purchase of goods and properties, abuse of businesses and financial institutions, cash and currency, and the informal sector; case studies include S v Dustigar, Motsepe v Commissioner of Inland Revenue, S v Van Zyl, S v Caswell, and Director of Public Prosecutions: Cape of Good Hope v Bathgate.

In the past decade the incidence of international crime has increased. As Louis Freeh, director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has stated, ‘grave crime is no longer bound by the constraints of borders’. As such crimes are not limited by state boundaries — approaching them on an international level is crucial. Thus, there has been an increased demand for the globalisation of efforts by law enforcement agencies to halt the rise in business and financially related crimes such as money laundering, tax fraud, securities fraud, intellectual property thefts, extortion, anti‐trust violations, computer crime, corrupt business practices and racketeering and combat violent crimes, terrorism, alien smuggling and drug trafficking.

‘Even in the very few instances where the accused has intrusted his defender with a full confession of his crime, we hold it to be clear that he may still be lawfully defended. The guilt of which he may be conscious, and which he may have so disclosed, he has still a right to see distinctly proved upon him by legal evidence … Human beings are never to be run down like beasts of prey, without respect to the laws of the chase.’